Do you remember good old-fashioned letters? You know the ones. The letters that come in the mail, and are to just see how you are doing. Remember how you would wait for the mail to come each day, just to see if your pen pal wrote you, or your grandparents or cousins? Now we may get special mail on our birthdays, or because of a death, but mostly the mail is business only. Those bills! Getting mail is no longer exciting.

I have found the same to be true of email. I remember first getting an email account. Oh, I was so nervous that no one wanted my address. Why in the world would they want to keep in touch with me? It was great to keep in touch with friends that I had not seen in a while. The good side is that we wrote long emails, and told how are families were and what was going on in our lives. We still connected on a deeper level, as with “snail mail”, we just did not need to wait for a week. Now my inbox is mostly ads and emails business related. Even with family, the letters are “can you do this for me?” type letters.

But now we get updates within minutes of what is going on in others lives. We get the random, “I m eating popcorn!” and it seems as if one hundred people like the fact we are eating popcorn. The deeper level is out, and our political opinions, haircuts, dogs and cats, everything are in!!! Nothing is left for the imagination any longer. I am part of this as well. I have all the social media accounts, including this here blog. I have found myself asking where the deeper level is. I know everything that is going on in my family’s’ lives, but I do not know how they are. Truly are. Not the surface, I’m fine answers. It seems that nothing is a mystery except for the things that shouldn’t be. The hurts, the true happiness, the opportunities to rejoice.

And so I go back to handwritten letters v. email v. social media. I do not know which one is better. I know that I want to feel that excitement again of waiting to here an honest response. Of wondering what I got in the mail today, postal or email. I want to know more about my friends and family. More than what they ate for dinner. But most definitely, I know this: it will take time and effort. We will actually have to do the work of staying in touch and reaching deeper in our relationships. Are we ready to know more than you just had popcorn? Or maybe, we should leave it at that because once we dig deeper, we will have to put forth more work. Are we ready for this? Personally, I do not know if I am. Are you?